rgxsingh

[rgxsingh]

“I want nothing. I just want the emptiness to mean something.”

— Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Short Stories (Scribner, 1987)

[rgxsingh]

When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the floorboards and got used to the smell. I’ve lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move onto the next. Life in neat little boxes is life neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson (via deformititties)

[rgxsingh]

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

[rgxsingh]

Words indeed have been my ruin; they have consumed me, and to the end I cannot be free of them

Ivan Turgenev

[rgxsingh]

"That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth".

— Turgenev

[rgxsingh]

Your soul is certainly, as Tolstoy says, a dark forest.

Marcel Proust, Les plaisirs et les jours (via lilyrevelis)

[rgxsingh]

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VII (via exhaled-spirals)

[rgxsingh]

We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.

Kafka On the Shore, Haruki Murakami (via macrolit)

[rgxsingh]

This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (via painsmemory)

[rgxsingh]

I fall asleep whispering “I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone I am safer alone" […] Forgive me, memory is a rope around the neck.

Clementine von Radics, from James (via unpetalled)

[rgxsingh]

yall ever just yearn? ever get filled with the most profound sense of longing for something you cant understand? yall ever crave? ever have an unexplainable ache?

[rgxsingh]

Nearly every artist can draw when he has made a discovery. But to draw in order to discover – that is the godlike process.

John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel (via soracities)

[rgxsingh]

Maybe no poet writes more than one [poem] and it takes a lifetime. He thinks he’s writing different short poems but really they’re all part of the same long one.

John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters (via firstfullmoon)

[rgxsingh]

Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov (via macrolit)

[rgxsingh]

I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.

Ray Bradbury (via quotefeeling)

[rgxsingh]

I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this… Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing ‘chicken’ and 'knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (via quotespile)

[rgxsingh]